Morphology EDL 1201 Linguistics for ELT Mohd Marzuki Maulud
objectives • Morphology: free and bound morpheme. • Morphological processes: inflection, derivation, compounding.
definition • Morphology is the study of words, their formation and their meanings. • Also the study of morphemes… • What is a morpheme?
a morpheme is… • Smallest identifiable grammatical unit. (R L Trask, 2004) Also ‘minimal units of meaning. • Trask gives the eg. of UNHAPPINESS • Unhappiness of Trask • Is built from 3 smaller pieces, i.e. • Un (prefix) • Happy (stem) • Ness (suffix)
C Poole defines morpheme as… smallest unit of words which have semantic or grammatical function, or • …minimal functional element of a word. • Some can stand on its own (roots – read, man, play) and some cannot (affixes – -er, -ly, re-).
Finegan (2004) says that ‘morphemes are word parts which carry meaning’. • Most words have >1 meaningful parts. • Untrue– how many parts? Untruthfulness? Truer? • Fromkin (pg 76) ‘most elemental unit of grammatical form.’ • Morphemes cannot be confused with syllables. See Finegan pg 47, and Fromkin pg 76
What are morphemes? • Most morphemes have lexical meaning, like ‘dash’, ‘woman’ or ‘teach’. • Other morphemes represent grammatical category or semantic notion, such as ‘ed’ in ‘dashed’ or ‘played’ or ‘jumped’. • Some morphemes are just lexical – ‘er’ changes ‘teach’ to ‘teacher’, or ‘buyer’ which are both new words.
What are morphemes? • Circumfixes – morphemes which are attached to another morpheme, both initially and finally (see Fromkin, pg 80) • eg. Un-believe-able, dis- -able, see pg 81
Free morpheme • Morphemes which can stand on its own, eg • Finegan gives the eg. TRUE, MOTHER, ORANGE. • Can you give other examples?
Bound morpheme • Morphemes which cannot stand on its own. For eg. • ‘un-’, ‘dis-’ ‘tele-’, ‘-ness’, ‘-er’, are just word parts and cannot stand on its own as a word.
Rules of morphology • Derivational morphology • - bound morpheme added to a morpheme (root word) resulting in a new word. Eg. • The word ‘Pure’ + ‘ify’ = ‘purify’ • ‘purify’ + ‘ation’ = ‘purification’ • Resulting in new words with different meanings, or class, which is derived from a root word.
Derived to form new word class • Noun changes to adjectives • Verb – noun • Adjective – adverb • Noun – verb • Adjective – noun • Verb – adjective • Refer to Fromkin pg 87
Inflectional morphemes • This is a type of bound morpheme, like cats, collected, sleeps, etc. changes the form of the word, but not the meaning of its central meaning/ lexical category. • Shows or functions to show number, gender, and tense.
COMPOUNDS • Morphological rules which allow the combining of two or more words to become new words. For e.g.: • Laptop • Hot dog • Deep-sea diver • Mile-high club • Lamb chops • Chicken chops
Acronyms • Words derived from the initials of several words which give a certain meaning, eg. • AWOL • ASAP • CC
BLENDS • It is similar to compounds. • The combining of shortened forms to two or more morpheme. For e.g.: • Breakfast and Lunch becomes ‘brunch’ • Motor Hotel – • Broiled and roasted – • Information - entertainment
Reading assignment • Please read • - Fromkin Chapter 3, pgs 69-107 • - Finegan Chapter 2, pgs 46-59 • - do exercise 1 – 5, pgs 109-110
